That’s all well and good. But for an electric car company, China isn’t a side interest — it’s the main show. With almost 20 million cars sold each year, it’s currently the world’s biggest auto market. And its government has pledged to put five million electric cars on its roads by 2020.

To meet its goal of becoming the No. 1 electric car company in the world, Tesla doesn’t just need to get competitive with domestic electric-car manufacturers like BYD, who outsell it regularly on their home turf. It needs to beat them handily.

The question is: Is Tesla up to the task?

Charging Challenges

Even if it might be readily apparent that the American model of electric car functionality won’t quite translate seamlessly to the Chinese market, underlying problems are more nuanced and varied.

The first roadblock? A scarcity of charging stations. Even if this is really just a perception problem, and not a reality, as Musk often claims, it’s a perception problem that needs to be addressed quickly.

Establishing stations in big cities, where drivers usually don’t have private garages, is already difficult. But for Tesla to succeed, they’ll need to establish a network of rural charging stations too. The Chinese like to take their cars on long road trips; the worry of running out of charge is a severe limitation (Tesla‘s Model S has an estimated range of up to 300 miles).

This is largely because, although the Chinese government has promised investment for charging stations in the ballpark of $16 billion, related government subsidies in this market were crafted only for lower-end electric car models, not the luxury Model S that Tesla currently sells.

An Innovative Advantage

With the charging-station issue still unresolved, Tesla’s domination of the electric-car market in China remains far from assured. It does have one ace up its sleeve, however: a reputation for technological innovation and excellence that could serve it well in the race for a more affordable, yet reliable, electric car. Even if graphene batteries don’t turn out to be the silver bullet some hope, other equally intriguing projects are already rolling out.

This summer, Tesla put out a new battery pack with anodes made partially of silicon — an innovation that increased pack energy by 5 percent and travel range by about 15 km. A few more important, if incremental, advances like this, paired with cost decreases, could help Tesla finally corner the market. But only time will really tell.

Research for this article was contributed by members of the Whale Path research community, as well as Poornima Apte of Hippo Reads.

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OverviewTesla Motors was started by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and strives to create a revolution and accelerate the world’s transition to electric mobility with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars. Tesla vehicles are EVs (electric vehicles), which are transforming the way people drive and move. Tesla has gone public as of June 29, 2010 and has a market cap of $2.47 billion …